It’s All About the Context: Why Brands Need Benchmarks

Picture this: You’re training for a half marathon and just ran an 8-minute mile, a week before the race. You’re probably feeling pretty good about yourself, right?

Now picture this: Everyone else in your running group just ran a 7-minute mile and practically lapped you going around the track. You were hoping to be on pace with them during the race. Knowing their pace changes your perspective on your own performance, doesn’t it?

Context is crucial, whether you’re a runner training for a race or a marketer measuring the performance of an ad campaign. While brands and marketers understand the importance of measuring their advertising campaigns, they might not know how their own performance metrics compare to those of the competition. Analyzing metrics in a vacuum poses a major problem, as most brands operate in highly competitive environments. With this in mind, it’s critical for brands to have benchmarks to be able to understand and measure success against standardized industry averages.

Benchmarks are especially important when it comes to footfall attribution. Visit Uplift, which measures the impact of ad exposure in driving visits to stores, is a key metric for marketers to use in evaluating their advertising performance. Yet for marketers to determine whether their campaign results — such as Visit Uplift — are good, bad, or average, they need to use benchmarks to see how their campaign performed against the industry or vertical as a whole.

For example, if a retailer’s ad campaign had a Visit Uplift of 52% and the retail industry benchmark for uplift was 3–21%, the retailer would conclude that the campaign was quite successful in driving in-store visits compared to the industry standard. Whereas if the industry benchmark was 60-85%, the retailer’s conclusion would be much different. In the latter case, while the campaign was successful in driving consumers to store, it underperformed compared to the industry benchmark. As such, the brand might want to make some tweaks to the campaign moving forward, such as changing its duration or using different creative messaging, in order to boost the Uplift into the benchmark range. In this way, footfall attribution benchmarks prove highly valuable for measuring success and for future strategic planning.

At the end of the day, brands and marketers must consider benchmarks not just to understand the context they operate in but ultimately in order to maximize their success.

Isabel is a digital marketer with a background in blogging, graphic design, and social media management. A graduate of Yale University, she majored in American Studies and is passionate about American literature and art history.